What is a brand story?
A brand story represents your company: it describes your business idea, explains your brand’s mission and vision, and portrays the people who run the company.
Your company story should clarify what you do, how you do it, and most importantly why you do it.
Brand storytelling is one the most powerful ways to breathe life into your brand and build a bridge between you and your audience.
Share your core values, beliefs, and mission. Be honest, real, and transparent—your customers will appreciate that.
Start with introducing your business. After the intro, move on to the body of the text—describe your mission and vision, the values that drive you forward, and other distinctive information about your business. End the story with a conclusion.
Woods Bay – Bigfork, Montana
Write your brand story with an open ending. It’s better to suggest that your story will continue.
For the Love of Guitar T-Shirt artwork by Kathy Bonnema Leslie
Highlight important facts
To keep your audience enthused, don’t dwell on plain data and insignificant details about your business. Instead, share valuable insights, interesting incidents, and unique facts.
Think about what makes it interesting from a customer’s perspective. Try thinking about the benefits, not the features—how does your brand help your customer?
When crafting your brand story, keep these 4 C’s in mind:
- Conflict
- Characters
- Community
- Confidence
1. Conflict—the problem you solve for your customers
Every story needs a conflict. If you analyzed well-known brand stories, you’d quickly notice that most of them portray a problem and a solution that the brand provides for their customers.
Stories need adversaries to build suspense and prompt the audience to read until the end. Imagine Little Red Riding Hood without the Big Bad Wolf or Snow White without the Evil Queen.
If there’s no problem, there’s no story brand.
2. Characters—the people behind the brand
A powerful brand story has to be authentic and honest. Most importantly, it has to be human. Just like any other story, your brand story needs characters.
Showing your human side makes your company more relatable and inspires customer loyalty. When it comes to brand storytelling, remember one simple thing:
people are more eager to engage with other people, not brands.
3. Community—involving customers in your story
The more your brand resonates with your customers, the more likely they are to keep coming back, interact with your brand, and share your content. That’s why successful brands make customers a part of their brand story. Successful brands make customers a part of their brand story.
Here are some other ways to make customers part of your company story:
- Interact with your audience: respond to comments and reviews, republish content your customers generate about your products, and listen to your customers’ opinion
- Write a newsletter, start a blog, or make videos to share stories with your audience
- Address a social cause that’s important to you and your customers
- Keep in mind—everything you do should be aligned with your brand’s values, mission, and beliefs.
4. Confidence—take pride in your brand story
Not every visitor will hit that About Us button on your website to learn what your business stands for. In fact, if that page is the only place where your brand story comes into the picture, you’re in trouble.
Your brand story should run through every step your customer takes while interacting with your brand. That means communicating your core brand values through product descriptions, marketing copy, visual materials, and public announcements.
That’s Living Life! It’s a HOOT!
We are currently in the process of designing and building Woody’s Bay online store and hope to have some exciting products available for purchase soon. We’re going to be offering some new original designs in a variety of formats for your enjoyment.
Woods Bay – Bigfork, Montana
We’ve been running Abacus Graphics, an intimate award-winning graphic design studio, creating exceptional graphic designs for print and the web since 1979. We figure it’s high time we start having fun creating some unique product designs of our own!
For the Love of Guitar T-Shirt artwork by Kathy Bonnema Leslie
Our first product was some high quality t-shirts printed with a unique artistic design featuring a forest of guitar trees. We partnered with K. Bonnema Leslie, a talented fine artist and owner of the very cool Art Fusion gallery in Bigfork, Montana, to use one of her original watercolor paintings on our t-shirts. The high quality t-shirts were printed using the direct-to-garment printing technique that produces fine detail and has a soft hand that wears very well.
The shirts were a great success and have sold out! So now we are all fired up to create some fresh new designs and have them available here in Woody’s Bay online store. We want to celebrate the love of life and to have some fun.
.. And we’ll be keeping an eye out for Woody too!
That’s Living Life! It’s a HOOT!